Santa set to greet Kilkenny's Chernobyl visitors as they arrive

Santa Claus will provide a special sleigh-ride escort to Dublin Airport from the Chernobyl-affected regions of Belarus for a group of children with special needs, who will spend Christmas here when they arrive on Tuesday.

The Christmas ‘Rest and Recuperation’ programme gives the children, who come from impoverished backgrounds and state-run institutions, a health-boosting reprieve from the toxic environment and high levels of radiation to which they are exposed.

The Kilkenny Outreach Group, under the leadership of Jim Kavanagh, will welcome vulnerable children and young adults to Ireland for this programme. Children as young as 10 will join Vasilli Lyskavets who will be returning to his loving Irish family, the Morrisseys, who are a volunteer host family with the charity’s Kilkenny Outreach Group. The Morrissey family have hosted Vassili for over 10 years, during which time he has become ‘one of the family’, even attending family weddings and special occasions.

Vasilli has lived in Vesnova Children Institution as long as he can remember. Abandoned to Vesnova with his brother at a young age, their lives appeared to be lost and separation seemed a certainty, but through CCI’s intervention the boys have been kept together. Vasili and his brother Alexei live together in CCI’s Independent Living Home.

The Kilkenny Outreach Group fundraise tirelessly throughout the year in order to give the children and adults a much-needed break.
Activities such as their hugely successful annual 2018 Mary Slattery Chernobyl Cycle as well as an American Tea Party funds the life-prolonging programme for so many. The success of CCI’s oldest programme is due to the commitment, dedication and kindness of thousands of host families from Kilkenny and all over Ireland.

“For many of these children, nothing as magical as this will ever have happened in their lives,” says charity founder Adi Roche.

“This is the true meaning of Christmas – it’s about family and sharing. The positive impact these stays have on the children is a testament to three generations of truly remarkable Irish volunteers like the Morrisseys.”

Studies have shed much needed light on the benefits of Rest and Recuperation to the children who live in some of the world’s most radioactive contaminated lands in the Chernobyl affected regions.